Who says evil is good?

We all know there is a difference between good and evil; the problem is that while there is a general consensus as to what is good and evil, there are some things that are considered good by some people, whereas others see those things as evil. Hence the question: who can tell what good really is? Who can define those things that are evil?

Let’s imagine a person who holds that burglary is actually a good thing to do; logically, therefore, everyone should do it – since if it is good, it should apply to all. If that person’s moral philosophy was held universally, burglaries would not only be commonplace they would incur no arrest or imprisonment. But everyone would be up in arms when someone stole something from them! Such a moral philosophy that flies in the face of human normality has to be wrong.

What about the person who believes it is good for people to sleep around with various sexual partners? If this is universalised as a wise moral philosophy, shared by all, you can imagine the kind of social chaos that would result. Is there someone who could impose wisdom in place of such a disaster?

These scenarios concern people who think they have the ability to define good and evil. While many make their own choices in moral questions, few would want their particular preference to be made into a universal law. Humans cannot impose their invented moral absolutes universally. People wouldn’t stand for it – though in some totalitarian states such abominable practices have occurred; and good people shudder.

While we all have a sense of right and wrong, we must acknowledge the limits of our wisdom when it comes to specifying what is good and what is evil for everyone. The prophet Isaiah calls out a certain perversity: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5.20). Woe upon such, indeed, for if that moral philosophy were to obtain, all hell would be let loose!

Friederich Nietzsche falls under that “woe”. He discarded God and any divine moral code and wiped out the moral order that obtained under Christianity; but he fully realised the desperate damage that would result – and which indeed has brought about the moral confusion of our secular society.

The fact is that while we have moral sensitivity and conscience, we do not have totally right views of good and evil. We need the light that comes from an absolutely good source. This is a service that our Creator has done for us: he alone is “holy, holy, holy”; his wisdom alone is able to provide true goodness to enlighten the conscience with which he has endowed us. All other potential helpers are poisoned with evil in our hearts, so unaided, we can never get it right. The Ten Commandments are God’s basic ground-rules, but there is a lot more we need to know. So God sent his holy Son to teach us the subtleties of true good living, and to call us to it. He it is whose call comes to us to “repent” – to rethink our ways and to alter our behaviour in the light of His will that defines good for us. Ultimately only God can provide the moral absolutes we need.

The wondrous thing about the Christian revelation is not only that in it God provides those truly good moral absolutes, but also, by God’s loving grace, it introduces us to a heavenly Father who forgives our many misdeeds and makes us anew as we are “born again”.

Clive Every-Clayton

June 25, 2025 0

Hope of heaven

The deep reason why we all apprehend death is that we fear some kind of judgment in the next life. People of various religious or philosophical persuasions do all sorts of difficult things to try and free themselves from that fear. Both the anxiety and the religious or mental effort we expend on this issue testify to two essential truths.

First, we understand in our conscience that evil ought to be punished. This intuition comes – whether we realise it or not – from the fact that we humans were originally made in the likeness of a good and holy God. He endowed us with an understanding of good and its opposite, making us conscious that we are responsible to him for our behaviour.

The second essential fact that this fear communicates is the realisation that we have done reprehensible things. Our conscience is not clean; this should instruct us that we need forgiveness, and only God can forgive.

God did not create us with the total freedom to potentially commit all kinds of misdeeds without ever facing any kind of divine assessment with some corresponding sanction. This is built in to who we are: we are God’s creation, answerable to him for our lives. We are not chance by-products of a haphazard impersonal explosion of material substances; that kind of philosophy leads logically to moral chaos and is unliveable. Fortunately, God himself has told us, by sending his Son, Jesus, that “the Creator, at the beginning, made man and woman” (Matthew 19.4). The same Jesus informed us also that there would be a day of reckoning.

Now it is of the utmost importance to be ready for that Day of Judgment, because it determines our destiny for ever and ever. It will either be bliss or horror. There is no half-way house. The invention of “purgatory” was an erroneous idea of some early Christian thinkers, but it has no basis in the sacred Scriptures. On the contrary, Jesus taught that at the last Day, when all will be gathered for the final judgment, there will be only two camps – the saved who are “blessed” to enter into God’s glorious kingdom, and the lost who Jesus said “go away into eternal punishment”, describing it as “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25.46, 41).

Those who receive the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour, in a decision of repentance and faith-commitment to follow him, may legitimately nourish the hope of “eternal life” because Jesus made that formal promise in the Gospels. Listen to his words and pause to take them in: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5.24). Did you get that? No judgment – that is, no punishment, no hell. Passed from death to eternal life. Wow! That’s worth having! How? By faith in Jesus and in the Father who sent him to be our Saviour.

Jesus says again, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3.16). That’s how to be sure of not perishing in eternal punishment – by entrusting yourself to Christ as Lord and Saviour, to believe in him, to follow him, and obey his teaching. Jesus added, that “whoever believes in him is not condemned” – there is that assurance again – no hell. Instead, “the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6.23).

Clive Every-Clayton

November 14, 2023 0

Is there any hope?

Hope is the confidence that a positive outcome will occur. The reason many are hopeless today is that they see no reason to expect a good outcome in the world in which we live. I’m not going to list all the horrors that we may fear – I think we know them all too well. The question is rather, how can we have any hope that things in the future will be better than the present?

The difficulty is that human nature does not essentially change. We will always be that mixture of good and evil. If good people prevail in government, peace and prosperity might come; if evil people rule, we may suffer the opposite. And when you study history, you may well conclude that there is little hope that life will be peaceful and things will go better.

Some trust in the advances of science, and we must be thankful for every progress in the field of medicine, in particular, that will improve our well-being. But still we will all face death. Others look to Artificial intelligence (AI) with great expectations, while many fear what such “intelligence” may do. It all depends on who wields and guides that AI – for good or for evil. And as the very notions of good and evil are disputed and twisted, the future still looks bleak.

These blog posts deal with “authentic hope”: how can hope be authentic? When we wonder who can tell what the future holds, the answer is – only one person: God. He is not bound by time, as we are: he is eternal. He sees the end already. He knows where everything is headed, and indeed, he has the almighty power necessary to ensure that his ultimate good purposes will be fulfilled. As he is Lord over all creation, he alone can give us authentic hope for the future (as well as true hope for answers to our existential questions). He, and he alone, knows the future. In fact he holds the future in his hands.

The Bible speaks a lot about hope. There’s a text in the Bible that speaks of people “without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2.12). If God alone can hold out hope for our future, then those without God are without any solidly grounded hope.

Not many people realise that God has unveiled the future of our human existence. The greatest element in the biblical hope is that the world will end with the return of the Lord Jesus Christ in power and glory. “He will come to judge the living and the dead”: that phrase of the Christian creed sums up what lies ultimately ahead of us all. No evil-doer can escape the final judgment of God. If there was no ultimate reckoning, then all justice is meaningless. But God has inscribed the presentiment of just judgment in the conscience of every human being. This serves to prevent many horrible crimes and atrocities, but those who bypass the restraints of conscience should realise that they will nevertheless face ultimate judgment.

Now this, of course, for all of us, is not exactly joyous hope! We would not like a God of absolute holiness to examine the details of our lives and administer justice according to our misdeeds. While that is not “good news”, there is wonderful good news in the message of the Gospel of Christ. Through faith in our Lord and Saviour, we may be absolutely delivered from the condemnation due to us on that judgment day. This good news gives real hope, as I will share further.

Clive Every-Clayton

November 14, 2023 0

A good conscience

The philosopher Emmanuel Kant was impressed, he said, by two things: the starry sky at night and the moral law within. The stars tell of the greatness of the Creator; the conscience speaks of his holiness.

When the holy Creator made persons in his likeness, he inscribed into the depths of our inner nature a consciousness of right and wrong. This is one of the outcomes of our species being made “in the image of God”. Indeed, our conscience speaks with a quasi-divine authority, warning us of temptations and reproving our faults.

Did you ever stop to think that everyone without exception knows what it is to have a bad conscience? Our conscience tells us, in spite of ourselves, when we’ve done wrong and it makes us feel bad. It is our inner sense of justice. When we sin, it tells us we are guilty.

It is important to know how to deal with this uncomfortable feeling of guilt. The wise Swiss Doctor Paul Tournier penned a book entitled, “True and False Guilt”, showing that false guilt is that which comes from being criticised by people, and we can feel guilty when we have actually not done wrong.

Our conscience judges our actions by the light of our own “inner law”. The voice of conscience is a universal experience, but the “inner law” by which we judge ourselves varies from person to person, and we can either educate it or relax it, consciously or unconsciously.

Although our conscience is not therefore an infallible moral guide, it does make us aware of the wrongness of temptations, and if we listen, it makes us conscious of our sins. Happy the one who has a good clean conscience!

We are endowed with conscience so that we are constantly reminded that we should do good, not evil. The reason that the experience of a bad conscience is universal is that we are all morally imperfect; we all err, make moral mistakes, fall short of our duty. So through our conscience, God is telling us that we are sinners and we need forgiveness.

Forgiveness is one of our heart’s deep needs; without it, people have been led to despair, to suicide, to hopelessness and even to madness. The problem, and the good news, are expressed in the words of Psalm 130.3-4: “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness”. Yes, God is in the business of forgiving sinners!

And when God forgives, he does it well! He wipes the slate completely clean! “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more”, he says (Hebrews 8.12). “Though your sins are like scarlet they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1.18). Nothing else in all the world can work that miracle of real forgiveness; it is God’s own speciality. If you need forgiveness (and who doesn’t?) you must apply to Him.

And getting forgiveness is the gateway into the harmonious relationship with God that we were made for, that gives true human fulfilment. So how do we get it?

I’ll take a few more blog posts to make it clear, as it is so vital and wonderful. But just realise this first: you can’t buy it, you can’t earn it, you don’t deserve it. It is a gift! God gives it because he is a God of grace.

Clive Every-Clayton

September 10, 2023 0